Dare Mighty Things

Maybe Pat Tillman did it for patriotism. Maybe he did it out of a sense of duty. I think maybe he did it because it was real.

We use the words survival, victory, defeat, battle and death to describe high school sports and tv game shows. Maybe Mr. Tillman chose to go to war because it was a real life and death endeavor.

Sociologists tell us that football (like almost all sports) is a highly stylized combat ritual. Maybe Mr. Tillman saw, in the light of a real war, the shallow, inconsequential nature of rich Americans sitting on their couches shouting profanity at their televisions while they watch paid athletes play out a colorful mimicry of combat.

The need for a life and death struggle is inside me. Maybe my great grandfather was a soldier and that impact on his genetic code is coming out in me. My grandfather fought in WWII. My father served in Vietnam. Next to that everything I've done in my life seems to pale.

I'm not so stupid as to say that I don't fear my own death or that I would go into battle and not be afraid but I seem to be more afraid of my own slow death over the next fifty years. I do not glamorize war, either. CNN coverage has reinforced the old adage that war is hell. I can however, understand the warrior's prayer for victory and if not victory, then an honorable death.

Maybe I just read too many of these quotes when I was a kid.

It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.
Horace (65 BC - 8 BC), Odes


Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919)